The RobertTaylorHomes is the site where, in May 2006, a white 21-year-old woman from California was thrown or jumped out of a seventh-storey window, after she was released from the local jail, leading to severe injuries.

Taylor and his executive secretary at the Chicago Housing Authority, Elizabeth Wood, had dreamed that fl and white tenants would live side by side in the new projects; the RobertTaylorHomes have always been essentially all fl.

In the 1970's, the neighborhood surrounding the TaylorHomes, like many of the older fl districts of big American cities, began losing population as its better-off residents escaped the crime of the ghetto and moved out to formerly all-white middle-class neighborhoods and suburbs.

Robert and Thomas were both members of a gang called the Cobra Stones and ran into their share of trouble.

RobertTaylor was an ardent spokesman of the ideas that had led to the foundation of CHA in 1937, when its program declared that a central concern was to build subsidized apartments for low-income families unable to afford decent, safe and clean housing.

RobertTaylor lost the struggle and resigned; the city council members had their say; the old slums were replaced by new ghettos.

The compound called RobertTaylor Homes—actually two projects—was the last and largest of a series of similar projects; in fact, it was, in its time, the largest urban housing project in the world.

This massive housing project was ironically named after RobertTaylor, an African American activist and Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) board member who in 1950 resigned when the city council refused to endorse potential building locations that would induce racially integrated housing.

Despite the structurally sound exteriors of the buildings and an academic study that found two out of three Taylor residents opposed to the demolition, the CHA had demolished half of the buildings by the year 2000.

Chicago'sRobertTaylorHomes public-housing development is the largest subsidized residential complex in the world.

Despite overwhelmingly depressed conditions, RobertTaylor's 4,300 households lead lives that are as patently "American" as those in Dayton, Ohio or Manhattan's Little Italy or Upper East Side.

I lived for two years a block away from the RobertTaylorHomes during the early 90's, and have come to realize that the problem doesn't lie in the tenants of the projects, but the neglection of the city.

American Project by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh is a history of Chicago's notorious RobertTaylorHomes; From the Puritans to the Projects by Lawrence J. Vale is the saga of public housing in the city of Boston.

By 1965 it was home to 27,000 souls, 20,000 of them children and young people, and it already had gained a local reputation as a dangerous and forbidding place.

The projects were home to a "new kind of tenant," the reporters explained: Welfare families made up an average of 13 percent of public housing households, and the proportion of broken families in some projects was as high as 30 percent.

www.prospect.org /print/V12/6/hoffman-al.html (2612 words)

Robert Taylor Homes Site Profile(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)

RobertTaylorHomes consists of two subdevelopments, RobertTaylor - A and RobertTaylor - B, which together have a total of 4,231 units.

This application is targeted to Taylor - B which has 2,400 units located in 16 high-rises Phase I of Taylor will ultimately incorporate 250 replacement units off-site in the greater Mid-South community and the construction of a new neighborhood shopping center that will replace the existing center which is proposed for demolition.

The revitalization of Taylor is tightly linked to the City's overall EZ Economic Initiatives which includes providing affordable housing, health and human services, youth business and cultural enrichment programs.

RobertTaylorHomes is bordered by Pershing Road on the south, State Street on the east, the Rock Island Railroad tracks on the west and 54th Street on the south.

RobertTaylor was considered the largest public housing development in the world when it was completed in 1962.

The master redevelopment plan for RobertTaylorHomes, recently renamed Legends South, includes construction of 2,550 mixed-income rental and homeownership units, as well as community and management facilities, and new retail space.

RobertTaylorHomes are located within an area that has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the city and state.

In addition, 37 percent of all births recorded in the RobertTaylorHomes were to teens, who represent one of the highest risk groups for delivering low-birthweight infants.

These grants from RWJF supported the establishment of a maternal and child health care center at the RobertTaylor Homes.The first grant (ID# 012955) supported the development of a primary care clinic and medical program at the CSCD, which was located in a renovated floor of one apartment building in the housing complex.

Taylor Park sits on West 47th Street, at the heart of the RobertTaylorHomes, the nation's largest public housing project.

The Chicago Housing Authority developed the TaylorHomes in the early 1960s, cutting a wide swath along the western edge of Bronzeville, Chicago's historic "Black Metropolis." The housing complex, designed by Shaw, Metz, and Associates, included a substantial community building with various meeting rooms and a combination gymnasium and assembly hall.

Taylor's work on the Michigan Boulevard development led to his appointment to the CHA board of directors, on which he served from 1938 to 1950.

By the end of the plan, the once-largest family housing development, RobertTaylor, will be reduced from its 1999 standing of 1,559 occupied units to a final tally of 851 available public housing units.

The rebuilding on the footprint of the TaylorHomes is slated to begin this year, as the first of three mixed-income communities, Hansberry Square, will introduce a variety of low-rise buildings where the high-rises once stood.

The RobertTaylorHomes have been reduced to a single building, a handful of final residents and a promise of something better.

www.chicagodefender.com /page/local.cfm?ArticleID=4868 (2333 words)

Falling From the Robert Taylor Homes at David W. Boles’ Urban Semiotic(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)

She ends up at the RobertTaylorHomes, a short distance from the Loop, but a world away from Chicago’s magnificent mile near where Oprah has her home and tourists window-shop at designer stores.

I’ve heard about the terror of the RobertTaylorHomes complex in the past – the whole thing was a magnificent idea that was doomed to fail in reality — but I thought the entire series of buildings had been torn down.

CHICAGO A man Chicago Police believe was alone with a 21-year-old California woman before she plunged from a seventh-floor window of the RobertTaylorHomes was being interviewed by investigators Wednesday, sources said.

RobertTaylorHomes residents aren't the only ones getting charged about their high electric bills.

As RJ has reported over recent months, many of the residents in RobertTaylorHomes have electric bills in the amounts of $500 to $22,000, and in some cases more.

Former RobertTaylorHomes resident Lobeta Holt became another homeless statistic this fall despite promises from the Chicago Housing Authority that residents would have a roof over their heads during the Plan for Transformation Holt is a 30-year-old, disabled mother of six who has paperwork to prove she is lease-compliant.

The survey was conducted by Taylor residents and the University of Illinois at Chicagos Nathalie P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement, a research group that studies public housing redevelopment.

The Taylor A council opposes the plan because it strayed too far from what was in the interests of the residents, said Shahshak B. Levi, a resident of 4331 S. Federal St. and member since 1996.

Cathery, who now returns to Taylor to work as a janitor, calls it my roots. Public housing provided her five children with a four-bedroom apartment, where a room could handle three beds and still not be crowded, she said.

EVANSTON, Ill. --- The RobertTaylorHomes -- once 28 towering buildings stretching along Chicago’s South State Street for 16 city blocks -- are the subject of a photography exhibit at Northwestern University from Feb. 2 through April 1.

Both the opening and “The RobertTaylor Project” exhibit are free and open to the public.

He chose the TaylorHomes in part because, as the nation’s largest public housing community, it is practically synonymous with the high-rise housing projects built in the 1960s.

That ugly truth was recently brought home to hundreds of residents at three highrise buildings at Chicago'sRobertTaylorhousing project, a massive housing development that stretches two miles through the heart of Chicago's southside Black community.

Another woman's brother had arrived at Taylor early in the morning to work on the food program and was hauled away later in the day by police.

While the police department denies that any brutality or coercion has gone on during their assault on RobertTaylor, the experience of one man who was picked up speaks to the truth of the kind of "proper police procedure" that went down.

rwor.org /a/v20/970-79/972/rtraid.htm (1636 words)

cbs2chicago.com - A Last Glimpse Of The Robert Taylor Homes(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)

The three women have watched the 27 other buildings that composed the TaylorHomes -- once the largest public housing project in the world -- crumble down as part of the Chicago Housing Authority's rebuilding of its system.

The Plan for Transformation, as the CHA pitches it, is a sweeping effort to erase the policy errors of the past and replace them with a new generation of homes nestled in mixed-income communities.

When the RobertTaylorHomes were opened in 1962, then-Mayor Richard J. Daley stood beneath an archway that proclaimed, "Good Home Building Good Citizens." Optimism was in the air; the new high-rises seemed to be the solution to helping people emerge from a cycle of poverty.

We tend to forget that in civil societies children can play outside, one and all walk the streets with impunity, and gunfire is the exception not the rule.

The poor and largely fl people of the RobertTaylorHomes are treated as “second-class” citizens, not because of the gun sweeps, as Congressman Henry Gonzalez (D-Texas) put it, but because they are denied the most elementary protection any state owes to its citizens: protection of life and limb.

The issues, even in the RobertTaylorHomes, encompass more than apartment searches; the same civil libertarians also try to block the use of photo Ids for residents and screening gates at public housing entrances, two other measures essential for the protection of residents from gangs and drug lords.